| Sprite
ripping is kind of a weird process. The first time you see a huge
sheet with hundreds of frames of animation you may be wondering
how the hell people do it. I'm gonna try and explain it in this
tutorial, but you should know this isn't my best work and I've been
meaning to update it for a long time now.
The techniques described in these tutorials may not be for everyone.
Some crazy rocket scientists out there prefer to hax the megahutz
(or something like that) and extract sprites directly from game
data. For blue collar schmoes like us, this is probably the best
way to go. Note that you will need at least a decent computer to
run emulators (especially Visual Boy Advance) and Animget.
1) First
of all, you need an emulator. An emulator is a program that simulates
the function of a game console. The best place to find these is
at http://www.zophar.net/.
Of course, you need the right emulator for the right job. Here is
my official list of reccomendations and why I reccomend that specific
emulator.
- SNES - Snes9X
- Why: Snes9X
is an excellent emulator, with the ability to disable layers
and tons of other neat features.
- Alternate: ZSnes
- A lot of people
prefer Zsnes, and I'm not really sure why. The controls and
interface are really annoying to set up. Still, it has tons
of features and the ever-important ability to disable layers.
I'm pretty sure it can also advance frames one at a time,
but that's a feature that's not always too useful for SNES.
Skip it unless you want a headache.
- Genesis - DGen
- Why: DGen has
been discontinued for a while now, so not a lot of people
know about it or use it. But the fact of the matter is, it's
an excellent emulator, in general and for ripping sprites.
It has the ability to disable layers, and it divides them
very well so you should be able to get exactly what you want.
It also supports the common .gsx save file type, which is
a big plus.
- Alternate: Megasis
- Megasis is
a japanese-developed Genesis emulator, and it's not the best
around, so you may not have heard of it. However, it's a great
second choice for ripping. It can disable layers (it simplifies
the graphics into 4 layers as opposed to DGen's 8) and is
pretty simple beyond that. Does what it's told, and not much
else.
- Gameboy Advance
- Visual Boy Advance
- Why: Because,
VBA is the ultimate sprite ripping emulator? You can pause
the game and advance frames one by one, view individual sprites
with the emulator's "OAM Viewer" and "Map Viewer",
and of course, disable layers. Game saves are abundant and
the emulator is as cooperative as you could ever want it to
be.
- NES - Doesn't
really matter
- NES emulators
are a dime a dozen and they're all pretty much the same. Layer
disabling tends to not be a very useful feature.
2)
You'll also need a rom file. These are the actual games that you
can run in the emulator. Note that these are pretty much considered
illegal, so you're on your own for finding them. A bit of advice:
if a site asks you to vote, don't do it.
3)
The next thing you'll need is Animget.
Animget is a great program that takes screenshots every 1/100th
of a second or something like that, but only keeps them if the one
before it is different. So, if you activate the program, go into
your emulator and start moving around and doing stuff, Animget will
capture all of the different frames that appeared on screen and
save them in its "shots" folder. NOTE: You need a pretty
good computer to run Animget and an emulator, especially for GBA.
If your computer really sucks you probably won't be able to use
it.
Now that you have all those
things, you're ready to move on. Choose the system you want to learn
about specifically.
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